High-Content Words in Patent Records Reflect Key Innovations in

High-Content Words in Patent Records Reflect Key Innovations
in the Evolution of Technology
Devin Chalmers1 , C. Cooper Francis1 , Noah Pepper1 , and Mark A. Bedau1,2,3,∗
1
Center for Advanced Computation, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, USA
2
FOLSATEC, European School of Molecular Medicine, Milan, Italy
3
Initiative for Science, Society, and Policy, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
∗
Contact author: [email protected]
Abstract
We study the evolution of technology as reflected in the US
utility patents granted in the period 1976-2009. Previous
work by Skusa and Bedau (2002) and Buchanan et al. (2010)
used cumulative citation statistics to identify the inventions
that most affect the course of evolution (those with the highest innovative impact). Here we examine the text of patent
records (specifically, titles and abstracts) to identify which
features are responsible for the high impact on later innovations. We use the TFIDF metric (term frequency times inverse document frequency) to identify which words best convey a patent’s explicit content. Because a new patent is required to cite all important earlier patents (“prior art”) that
introduced innovations on which the new patent depends, we
use the TFIDF scores of words in citing patents to identify a
patent’s emergent content. A patent’s emergent content explains its impact on subsequent inventions; it reflects what
traits in an invention actually led to a significant number of
subsequent innovations. We illustrate two ways to visualize
the explicit and emergent content of patents: word arrays and
clouds. Examining the emergent content of populations of
patents issued during different epochs reveals when important new ideas appear in the evolution of technology and how
they affect its subsequent evolution.
Introduction
This paper presents a method to quantify and visualize certain aspects of the evolution of technology as reflected in
patent records. Previous work by Skusa and Bedau (2002)
(summarized by Bedau (2003)) used citation statistics to
visualize and quantify one specific subset of cultural evolution: the evolution of technology as reflected in patent
records. Buchanan et al. (2010) developed and extended this
use of patent citations to identify which new inventions over
the past three decades have seeded the greatest number of
further innovations, termed patent “superstars.” They concluded that three of the most important inventions in the past
three decades were ink-jet printing, PCR, and stents, and
they further showed that many superstar patents are “dooropening” inventions that spawn an especially wide range of
further types of innovations.
This previous work highlights the importance of answering the following questions:
1. How can we identify which features characterize the core
content of an invention?
2. In particular, which features make superstar patents so
successful at spawning future inventions?
3. How have the key features driving technological innovation changed over the past few decades?
This paper aims to answer these three questions.
First, following the approach of Skusa and Bedau (2002)
and Buchanan et al. (2010), we use citation statistics to identify how the key inventions driving technological evolution
(patent superstars) have changed over the past few decades.
To determine the content of these patents, a human can simply examine and interpret its title and abstract, but this process is labor intensive and introduces an element of subjectivity. We want to automate the process and make it objective, but this requires a method for identifying which terms
in a document from a corpus especially indicate the distinctive content of that document. The TFIDF metric (term frequency times inverse document frequency, described below)
is commonly used for precisely this purpose, so we identify the high-content terms in a patent record as those terms
with high TFIDF scores. This method can naturally be generalized to identify high-content sequences of terms, or ngrams.
There is a complication that must be discussed. The highcontent terms in a patent tend to reflect what the inventor
believes are the important features of the invention; below,
we term this the invention’s explicit content. However, the
features of an invention that actually play the biggest role in
spawning further innovation might not be anticipated by the
inventor, so they might not be well reflected in the patent’s
explicit content. Instead, they might be only implicitly reflected in the terms in the patent’s title and abstract. Accordingly, to determine what features actually are important for
an invention’s fecundity, we look to the high-content words
in the patents that cite the invention; below, we term this the
invention’s emergent content.
The explicit and implicit content of sets of patents can
be visualized by two complementary methods: word arrays
and word clouds. By applying these methods to patents from
successive epochs, we visualize how the explicit and emergent content of key inventions have changed over time. Our
results described below indicate that innovation in the later
half of the 1970s was especially active concerning automobile emissions and personal electronics. In the 1980s, the
dominant technology drivers shifted to zeolites and semiconductors. The 1990s and 2000s were both dominated
by a range of further technologies, especially inkjet printing, PCR, stents, e-commerce, wireless communication, and
solid-state storage.
Our work here illustrates how citations and key terms in
patent records provide a rich empirical foundation for the
study of the evolution of technology. Since technology is
one aspect of culture, this work helps illuminate the similarities and differences between cultural and biological evolution. As the papers in Wheeler et al. (2002) indicate,
a variety of approaches are being applied to the study of
the evolution of culture. The application of the concept of
memes from Dawkins (1989) is especially hotly disputed,
as illustrated by comparison of Sperber (1996), Fracchia
and Lewontin (1999), Dennett (2006), and the papers in
Aunger (2000). Rather than adding to these polemics, we
provide an empirically grounded account of the actual evolution of one important aspect of culture–patented technological innovations–and we develop a method for identifying the key features in inventions that make their impact on
new innovations especially big. This line of research might
eventually help resolve some of the controversies about cultural evolution, including those about memetics.
The patent record
Patents are granted to inventions only if the patent’s examiners are satisfied that the invention is novel, non-obvious, and
useful. A patent’s novelty is documented by citing the previous patents (and sometimes published papers) on which it
depends and builds; these are known as the patent’s “prior
art.” Perko and Narin (1997) and Hall et al. (2005) explain that the patent examiner is the ultimate referee of what
patents must be cited, and can add citations that were neglected or omitted on the application.
Our data set consists of records of all the utility patents
granted between 1976 and 2009 in the US. (That time window was chosen because of the ready availability of patent
data for that period.) In this study, a patent’s title and abstract are concatenated to constitute its “record.” (A natural generalization of our methods would add further text
to a patent’s record, such as its claims. Our analysis also
uses certain other information about a patent, such as its
unique identifying number and, most importantly, the previous patents which it cites–its “prior art.”)
Our corpus of 3,630,466 patent records contains
459,232,327 individual word tokens, employing a dictionary
of 993,544 word types. Our analysis relies crucially on ci-
tations among patents. The patents in our data set bestowed
a total of 38,893,014 citations, of which 30,198,227 (about
80%) hit patents in our dataset. Our patents on average cite
10.97 earlier patents and are cited 8.25 times, but 87,695
(2.4%) cite no previous patents.
Our investigation of the evolution of technology is motivated by an analogy with biological evolution. A patented
invention is viewed as an organism, and different inventions
compete for adoption by users in various niches. The spread
of inventions in niches is analogous to the Darwinian process
of natural selection (we make no assumptions here about
how close that analogy is). When a new patent cites prior
art (i.e., earlier patented inventions on which it depends and
builds), we consider the earlier patent to have spawned an
incipient daughter species.1 Those inventions that spawn especially many incipient daughter species and so are most
heavily cited, are the inventions that drive the course of the
evolution of technology.
From patent citations, it is possible to reconstruct the entire phylogeny of the evolving network of patented inventions. The entire set of patent records is analogous to the
entire fossil record, except that the patent record is virtually complete and mostly accurate and unambiguous.2 Accordingly the phylogenies that can be reconstructed are stunningly complete, covering every patent (organism in the
population). It would be a biologist’s dream to work with
empirical phylogenies that are this dense and accurate.
Shadow patents
In order to test whether the citation patterns that we observe
in the patent data could have been created by a random process that ignores the content of the patents involved, we
construct a system of “shadow” patents. By construction,
shadow patents mirror (or “shadow”) many aspects of real
patents.
The precise mechanism for generating shadow patents is
as follows: If p real patents were granted in year y, then
p shadow patents are also granted that year. If a particular
patent, i, is granted in year y and cites c earlier patents, then
the shadow patent, is , is also granted in year y and cites c
earlier shadow patents. However, whereas a real patent cites
its prior art, a shadow patent cites earlier patent chosen at
random (with replacement) from the patents cited by real
1
For simplicity of exposition and when no confusion should result, we will sometimes speak of a patent when we mean to refer to
the invention that is patented.
2
It is worth noting that the patent record is somewhat “dirty.”
Cleaning the data involves various ad hoc and approximate procedures, and raw data is sometimes corrupted or lost. It should be
noted in addition that simple citation metrics can draw an incomplete picture of what is happening in the patent data. We know
from Cohen et al. (2000) that patent value, citation rate, patent
frequency and citation methodology vary greatly in different industries. This should prompt a salutary dose of skepticism about
simplistic sweeping interpretations of citation patterns.
Shadow Activity
4000
2000
Activity
4000
0
0
2000
Activity
6000
6000
Top Decade Patents
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
Year
Year
Figure 1: Cumulative citations (or “activity”) of the twenty
most heavily cited patents from each decade (see Table 2),
divided by the prior expected probability of being cited.
Figure 2: Cumulative citations (or “activity”) of the twenty
most heavily cited “shadow” patents from each decade.
Compare with Figure 1.
patents granted in year y.
The system of shadow patents is a null hypothesis against
which we measure whether the citation patterns we observe
in real patents could have been created by a random process
that ignores the content of the patents.
citations from the first decade contribute to our analysis.
Figure 1 shows the cumulative citations received by the
twenty most heavily cited patents in each decade, colored
by the year in which the patent was granted. These cumulative citation counts dramatically illustrate which patents are
most influencing the evolution of technology at any given
time. Analysis of the patent titles and abstracts reveals
that the most “fecund” innovations of the past three decades
fall into the following technology sectors: automobile emissions, personal electronics, zeolites, semiconductors, inkjet
printing, PCR and stents. This decade-by-decade analysis
corroborates and extends the results reported by Buchanan
et al. (2010).
Figure 1 can be directly compared with Figure 2, which
shows the cumulative citation counts of the most heavily
cited shadow patents. (Real and shadow patents are normalized identically.) Note that the most heavily cited real
patents receive two orders of magnitude more citations than
their shadow counterparts. This indicates that heavy citation counts observed in the real patents are not merely an
artifact of the numbers of patents giving and receiving citations. Randomly distributed citations would never produce
the high citation counts observed for the most fecund inventions.
Many details about the evolution of technology can be
read off from Figure 1. For example, the most highlycited patents in the 1970s (concerning automobile emission and personal electronics) are never cited after the 70s
and become dormant (indicated by flat lines). In addition,
Highly cited inventions
Following Skusa and Bedau (2002) and Buchanan et al.
(2010), we begin by examining the most highly-cited
patents, for their high citation counts show that they have
an especially great influence on the subsequent evolution of
technology. Because of variation in the citation rate and size
of the patent corpus each year, we normalize citation counts
to make them comparable across epochs, as follows: In a
given year, each incoming citation count is divided by the a
priori expected probability of a patent being cited at a given
time. Assuming that all patents have an equal probability of
being cited, this prior probability of being cited at t is calculated as the number of citations given by all the patents
issued at t (the number of citations given out) divided by the
number of patents issued up to t (the number of patents that
could be cited). Exploration of different normalizations is
available in Buchanan et al. (2010).
First we examine the twenty patents that received the most
citations from all of the patents issued in each of the last few
decades. Table 2 describes most of the main innovations
covered by those patents. While some heavily cited patents
fall outside of the kinds of innovations we list, most do fit in
our list. Since our data starts in 1976, relatively few of the
Top Decade Patent Activity
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2813048
3135809
3239478
3271922
3281383
3383435
3516997
3658634
3661423
3672155
3686025
3702886
3738339
3745768
3759232
3759807
3760171
3778614
3813533
3827237
3845770
3856513
3867380
3947375
3953566
3986997
4021224
4024163
4061724
4063220
4064521
4098888
4105776
4217374
4226898
4228496
4230463
4237224
4258264
4313124
4345262
4367924
4440871
4459600
4463359
4535773
4558333
4655771
4683195
4683202
4723129
4733665
4740796
4776337
4901307
5103459
5111638
5143854
5167024
5172338
5523520
5572643
5643826
5710887
5742905
5892900
Figure 3: The citation rate for the twenty most heavily cited
patents from each decade (see Table 2). Citations are normalized as in Figure 1, and scaled to the interval [0, 1].
one patent (concerning zeolites) is especially heavily cited
through most of the 1980s, but its influence subsequently
is dominated by a new group of patents (about inkjet printing, PCR, and stents) from the late 1980s, which eventually
achieve the highest citation counts overall.
Figure 3 plots the citation rate time series for each of
the patents depicted in Figure 1, scaled to the range [0, 1].
(Mathematically, this corresponds to the slope of the patents
shown in Figure 1.) This heatmap shows each patent at
each moment, with hotter colors indicating patents that are
spawning more new inventions. The heatmap shows that citation rates for most of the most heavily cited patents have
cooled off by 2005, and a new crop of patents (about, e.g.,
genetically modified organisms, e-commerce, and solidstate storage) are heating up today.
The TFIDF measure of high-content words
In this paper, we identify the words that best capture the
content of an invention by applying the TFIDF metric to
the words in the invention’s patent record. TFIDF scores
are a standard way to measure the significance of a word in
a given document within a corpus, as Spärch Jones (1972)
and Salton and McGill (1983) explain. The intuitive idea
behind the TFIDF metric is that the most significant words
in a document are used frequently within that document, but
are not widely used in other documents from the corpus.
Accordingly, the measure has two components: term fre-
quency (TF), and inverse document frequency (IDF). Term
frequency is just the frequency of a word w in a document
d:
|{w0 ∈ d : w0 = w}|
.
TF(w, d) =
|{w ∈ d}|
The inverse document frequency of a word w in a corpus
D is simply the logarithm of the inverse of the fraction of
documents in D which contain w:
IDFD (w) = log
|D|
.
|{d ∈ D : w ∈ d}|
Then the TFIDF score for a word w in a document d in a
corpus D is just the product of these two measures:
TFIDFD (w, d) = TF(w, d) × IDFD (w).
To illustrate the TFIDF metric in the patent record, consider the title and abstract of US patent number 4683202
(granted 28 July 1987), which happens to be the most cited
patent in the last decade:
Process for amplifying nucleic acid sequences
The present invention is directed to a process for amplifying any desired specific nucleic acid sequence contained in a nucleic acid or mixture thereof. The process
comprises treating separate complementary strands of
the nucleic acid with a molar excess of two oligonucleotide primers, and extending the primers to form
complementary primer extension products which act as
templates for synthesizing the desired nucleic acid sequence. The steps of the reaction may be carried out
stepwise or simultaneously and can be repeated as often as desired.
The title and abstract contain 90 word tokens and 56 word
types. The most frequent word is ‘the’, appearing seven
times, for a term frequency of TF = 0.0778. However, the
ubiquitousness of ‘the’ gives it a very high document frequency within the patent corpus, and so a low inverse document frequency, IDF = 0.009, which shrinks its resulting
TFIDF score.
The words in the title and abstract of Patent 4683202
with the highest and lowest TFIDF scores appear in Table 1.
Note that words with the highest TFIDF scores convey a lot
of information about the topic of this patent; for example,
‘nucleic’, ‘acid’, ‘primers’, and ‘amplifying’ all have high
TFIDF scores. By contrast, words with the lowest TFIDF
scores (‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’, ...) convey virtually no information
about the patent. Instead, they are so-called “stop words”
that reflect grammar and logic rather than content.
The emergent content of patents
The evolution of technology that we study consists of the
rise and fall of superstar patents that dominate different
epochs. This raises a question: What is the content of the
Rank
Term
1
2
3
4
5
..
.
51
52
53
54
55
56
nucleic
acid
primers
amplifying
complementary
..
.
in
is
of
the
and
a
Count
TF
IDF
TFIDF
5
5
2
2
2
..
.
1
1
3
7
2
3
0.0556
0.0556
0.0222
0.0222
0.0222
..
.
0.0111
0.0111
0.0333
0.0778
0.0222
0.0333
2.3167
1.4203
3.2907
2.6341
2.2645
..
.
0.1187
0.1151
0.023
0.009
0.0217
0.0135
0.1287
0.0789
0.0731
0.0585
0.0503
..
.
0.0013
0.0013
0.0008
0.0007
0.0005
0.0004
Table 1: TFIDF values for words in the title or abstract of
patent no. 4683202, Process for amplifying nucleic acid sequences.
innovations in the superstar patents? Which of their features make them superstars? People can often glean such information by reading superstar patents’ titles and abstracts.
For example, personal inspection of Table 2 reveals a lot
about the content of the most highly cited patents during recent decades. Here we develop methods for determining a
patent’s content without human intervention. Specifically,
we use TFIDF profiles of the words in a patent to measure
the patent’s content.
We start with some definitions. We write C(p1 , p2 ) if
←
−
patent p1 cites patent p2 , and we let C (p) be the set of
patents that cite p, i.e., p’s “incoming” citations:
←
−
C (p) = {p0 : C(p0 , p)}.
←
−
Then, the number of patents that cite p, or | C (p)|, can
be used to identify the superstars of a set of patents, or
superstarsN (P ), as the N most heavily cited patents in P ,
←
−
ranked by | C (p)|.
Let the representative (or high-content) words of a patent
p in the patent record P be the set of words w in the patent
with TFIDF above a given threshold, θ:
TFIDFθ (p) = {w ∈ p : TFIDFP (p, w) ≥ θ}
(For this paper, we typically use a threshold of θ = 0.05,
which eliminates most stop words and typically picks out
just a few words from each patent.)
These concepts easily extend to a set of patents, P . We
can identify their citers,
[←
←
−
−
C (P ) =
C (p).
p∈P
and their high-content words,
TFIDFθ (P ) =
[
p∈P
TFIDFθ (p).
A central hypothesis in our paper is that the high-TFIDF
words in a patent, or set of patents, are key to revealing their
content. We consider TFIDFθ (P ) to be the explicit content
of a set of patents, and we consider the emergent content of
a set of patents, P , to be the high-content words in the set of
patents that cite patents in P , or
←
−
TFIDFθ ( C (P )).
This content is “emergent” because it is implicit; it depends
on what subsequent inventions “see” in the inventions in P ,
and how the inventions function as prior art. Analogously,
←
−
TFIDFθ ( C (superstars(P ))) is the emergent content of the
superstars of a set of patents, P . We give examples of both
kinds of emergent content below.
Visualizing emergent content with word arrays
The evolution of the emergent content of the patents consists
of a list of words with various associated numerical values.
A word’s value can include such things as the word’s TFIDF
score, its frequency in the corpus, or the number of patents
that contain the word. The evolution of the emergent content in a set of patents can be visualized in various ways,
once two things have been determined: (1) Which words
contribute to the content? (2) How is the word’s numerical
value calculated? The visualization methods described here
work for any evolving list of words with associated numerical values.
Word arrays are simply lists of words in some fixed,
meaningful order, each associated with its numerical value
in a given time period. Word arrays are analogous to gene
chips, which visualize the expression profile of proteinproducing genes. Since word arrays can be represented
in one dimension, aligning word arrays from successive
snapshots of a population of patent records yields a twodimensional “movie” of the evolving meaning of a given
period of the evolution of technology.
Figure 4 shows the raw time behavior of the emergent
content of the superstar patents in Table 2. The words were
selected from the citers of the patents in the table. Word frequencies were computed over all of the abstracts of patents
issued in each year. For each word, a time vector of values is
computed, with each entry cw,t the word w’s raw frequency
in year t:
P
0
0
p∈Pt |{w ∈ p : w = w}|
P
cw,t =
p∈Pt |{w ∈ p}|
In Figure 4, each word’s vector has been scaled to fit the
range [0, 1], in order to show each word’s rise and fall relative to itself. Figure 4 provides one perspective on the
evolving content that is driving innovation in the evolution
of technology.
Successive columns in a word array indicate successive
moments of time. Figure 4 is like a “film strip” of the evolu-
Top patent story words
exhaust
combustion
fuel
engine
airfuel
aluminosilicate
catalyst
catalytic
zeolite
amorphous
processor
memory
silicon
semiconductor
…70s
80s
90s
00s
…
cartridge
printing
ink
printhead
inkjet
catheter
graft
intravascular
intraluminal
stent
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
dna
sequences
gene
polymerase
pcr
nucleic
Figure 4: The relative frequency over time of a subset of the
emergent content of the top technology patents identified in
Table 2. The x-axis is years, and the y-axis is individual
high-content words.
tion of certain high-impact players in the evolution of technology; each single column is a single frame in the film.
It is evident that the main innovation drivers of the 1970s
(automobile exhaust and personal computing) are almost
completely dormant today. Similarly, the main technology
drivers of the 1990s and 2000s (inkjet printing, PCR, stents,
and semiconductors) were almost completely dormant for all
of the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, inspection shows that
stents have been cooling off recently, while key components
of the PCR and semiconductor genealogies remain very hot.
Visualizing emergent content with word clouds
The word clouds described in this section are another way
to visualize how the content of inventions changes over the
decades. A word cloud is a two-dimensional agglomeration
of the high-content words in some patents, with the words
sized according to their numerical value. Since the most
important words are the largest, people can easily read the
key content in word clouds.
The algorithm for calculating word clouds from a set, P ,
of patents in a decade has three steps, illustrated in Figure 5:
1. Determine the decade’s superstar patents (colored blue in
the diagram), superstars(P ); these are the patents most
heavily cited by the patents issued in the decade.
2. Determine all the patents (green stars) that cite any of the
decade’s superstars, including patents granted after the
←
−
decade in question: C (superstars(P )).
Figure 5: Cartoon sketching the three stages by which word
clouds emerge out of a set of patents (e.g, those issued in
the 1990s). First, the superstars (blue stars) of the patents issued in the 1990s are identified, then their citers (green stars)
are identified, and finally the emergent content of the su←
−
perstars is identified: TFIDFθ ( C (superstars(patents1990s )).
Gray lines are citations between patents.
3. Identify the emergent content of the superstar patents,
←
−
TFIDFθ ( C (superstars(P )), arrange the words in a
3
cloud, and size each word w by the number
of patents in the decade that contain the word:
|{p ∈ P : TFIDFP (p, w) ≥ θ}| .
We illustrate word clouds by focusing on the superstar
patents in each decade, and extracting the emergent content
of superstars in the familiar way. In this case, we choose to
size the words in a word cloud by the number of patents in
the corpus that contain the word.
Figure 6 shows the word clouds that emerge from the
patents in each decade in our data set: the 1970s (starting with 1976), 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Collecting and
smoothly connecting these snapshots yields a movie of how
the key innovations in patented technology evolve over time.
Conclusions
There are many differences between biological evolution
and the evolution of technology, but there are also important similarities. The most important similarity here is the
non-randomness or adaptive quality of the key features of
the entities that have the greatest impact on new innovations.
Comparison with shadow patents confirms that citation rates
of the most heavily cited patents would virtually never occur if patents were cited at random and irrespective of their
3
Word cloud layout algorithm by Jonathan Feinberg, Wordle.net and IBM Research, http://www.wordle.net/credits.
Acknowledgments.
For helpful comments on the topics discussed herein, thanks
to Andrew Buchanan, Bobby Gadda, Norman Packard,
Emily Parke, and Federico Vaggi, and to the anonymous referees for Artificial Life XII.
References
Aunger, R. (2000). Oxford University Press, Oxford; New York.
Bedau, M. A. (2003). Objectifying values in science: A case study.
In P. Machamer, G. W., editor, Science, Values, and Objectivity, pages 190–219. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA.
Buchanan, A., Packard, N., and Bedau, M. (2010). Adaptive innovative impact on the evolution of technology in the patent
record. In Artificial Life XII (this volume). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Cohen, W. M., Nelson, R. R., and Walsh, J. P. (2000). Protecting
their intellectual assets: Appropriability conditions and why
u.s. manufacturing firms patent (or not). NBER Working Paper Series, w7552.
Dawkins, R. (1989). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press,
Oxford; New York, 2nd edition.
Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural
phenomenon. Viking.
Fracchia, J. and Lewontin, R. C. (1999). Does culture evolve? History and Theory, 38(4):52–78.
Hall, B. H., Jaffe, A., and Trajtenberg, M. (2005). Market value and
patent citations: A first look. Rand Journal of Economics.
Figure 6: The emergent word clouds for top cited patents in
the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s (from top to bottom).
The word clouds are still shots from a movie of the evolving
meaning of the main technologies driving the evolution of
technology.
specific features.
We identify the “emergent” content of sets of patents as
the “explicit” content of the patents that cite the patents in
the set, measured by high TFIDF scores. We use word arrays
and word clouds to visualize the evolution of the key features
of patents that have an especially high impact on new innovations. This brings us closer to understanding what makes
superstar patents so heavily cited.
Here, the environment that drives adaptation is the technological and economic context of an epoch. If patents and inventions are significantly analogous to biological organisms,
then we have created a new way to identify and visualize the
emergent semantics of technological evolution through time.
Whereas the citation record of patents provides a phylogeny
of patented inventions, word arrays and clouds represent the
changing emergent content of the drivers of technological
innovation through time.
Perko, J. S. and Narin, F. (1997). The transfer of public science
to patented technology: A case study in agricultural science.
Journal of Technology Transfer, 22: 65–72.
Salton, G. and McGill, M. J. (1983). Introduction to modern information retrieval. McGraw-Hill.
Skusa, A. and Bedau, M. A. (2002). Towards a comparison of
evolutionary creativity in biological and cultural evolution.
In Standish, R., Bedau, M. A., and Abbass, H. A., editors,
Artificial Life VIII, pages 233–242. MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Spärch Jones, K. (1972). A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval. Journal of Documentation, 28:11–21.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach.
Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass.
Wheeler, M., Ziman, J., and Boden, M. A., editors (2002). The
evolution of cultural entities. Oxford University Press.
Table 2: Major innovations (or technology “superstars”) as reflected in citation patterns from each decade.
Selections from the twenty patents that received the most citations from patents issued in 1976-1979
Automobile emissions
3827237: Method and apparatus for removal of noxious components from the exhaust of internal combustion engines
3759232: Method and apparatus to remove polluting components from the exhaust gases of internal combustion engines
3745768: Apparatus to control the proportion of air and fuel in the air-fuel mixture of internal combustion
engines
Personal electronics
3760171: Programmable calculators having display means and multiple memories
3672155: Solid state watch
3947375: Liquid crystal materials and devices
3813533: Clock calculator
Selections from the twenty patents that received the most citations from patents issued in 1980-1989
Zeolites
3702886: Crystaline zeolite ZSM-5 and method of preparing the same
4061724: Crystalline silica
4440871: Crystalline silicoaluminophosphates
Semiconductors
3856513: Novel amorphous metals and amorphous metal articles
4226898: Amorphous semiconductors equivalent to crystalline semiconductors produced by a glow discharge process
4217374: Amorphous semiconductors equivalent to crystalline semiconductors
4064521: Semiconductor device having a body of amorphous silicon
Selections from the twenty patents that received the most citations from patents issued in 1990-1999
Ink-jet printing
4723129: Bubble jet recording method and apparatus in which a heating element generates bubbles in a
liquid flow path to project droplets
4463359: Droplet generating method and apparatus
4740796: Bubble jet recording method and apparatus in which a heating element generates bubbles in
multiple liquid flow paths to project droplets
4558333: Liquid jet recording head
4345262: Ink jet recording method
4313124: Liquid jet recording process and liquid jet recording head
4459600: Liquid jet recording device
PCR
4683195: Process for amplifying, detecting, and/or-cloning nucleic acid sequences
4683202: Process for amplifying nucleic acid sequences
Stents
4733665: Expandable intraluminal graft, and method and apparatus for
4655771: Prosthesis comprising an expansible or contractile tubular body
4776337: Expandable intraluminal graft, and method and apparatus for
Selections from the twenty patents that received the most citations from patents issued in 2000-2009
Ink-jet printing
4723129, 4740796, 4463359, 4558333, 4345262, 4313124, 4459600 (see above)
PCR
4683202, 4683195 (see above)
E-commerce
5572643: Web browser with dynamic display of information objects during linking
5892900: Systems and methods for secure transaction management and electronic rights protection
5710887: Computer system and method for electronic commerce
Wireless communication
5103459: System and method for generating signal waveforms in a CDMA cellular telephone system
5742905: Personal communications internetworking
4901307: Spread spectrum multiple access communication system using satellite or terrestrial repeaters
Solid-state storage
5643826: Method for manufacturing a semiconductor device
5172338: Multi-state EEprom read and write circuits and techniques
Stents
4733665: (see above)
Citations
69
44
44
69
40
39
39
Citations
196
120
93
119
115
109
108
Citations
753
677
663
637
630
612
599
620
597
349
277
268
Citations
6518
2526
839
770
655
802
762
665
831
629
940